Typical enterprise-level data centers can include several to hundreds of racks or cabinets, with each rack/cabinet housing multiple servers. Each of the various servers of a data center may be communicatively connectable to each other via one or more local networking switches, routers, and/or other interconnecting devices, cables, and/or interfaces. The number of racks and servers of a particular data center, as well as the complexity of the design of the data center, may depend on the intended use of the data center, as well as the quality of service the data center is intended to provide.
Traditional servers of a data center are self-contained compute devices designed to be mounted into a corresponding rack of the data center. To do so, typical data center servers include a housing with corresponding mounting mechanisms, such as brackets, to facilitate the mounting of the server into the rack or cabinet. The electrical components of the server are located within the housing, and the housing provides an amount of protection to the electrical components from the local environment, as well as from stray electromagnetic interference. Additionally, typical servers often include their own peripheral components or systems, such as an internal power supply and internal cooling. As such, the housing of a typical server is sized for the inclusion of such components inside the housing itself.
In some data centers, each server may be embodied as a general purpose server capable of servicing different types of workloads. Of course, some servers may have different resources compared to other servers (e.g., more or fewer processor cores). In some cases, some of the servers may be special-purposed servers configured to handle specialized workloads.